Gulliver’s Travels

Last week I mentioned a piercing session I’d done with Lydia featuring a fair number of needles. This week I bring you a few photographs from the session. If you’re at all squeamish about piercings or naked gentleman bits, then I’d suggest not clicking on the image links. Both elements feature heavily. On the plus side, there is a sexy picture to finish.

The original plan A for the session was to do a butterfly boarding. We’d done this before, back in 2011, in one of the first sessions I documented. Unfortunately, Lydia couldn’t track down any foam board at short notice. Ever creative, she moved onto a plan B of using my body as the board. Specifically my thighs and stomach. The idea was to pierce through the genitals and then through the torso skin, stitching everything into place with needles. That sounded good in theory, but several painful minutes demonstrated it didn’t work well in practice. The needles tended to pull out too easily. Fortunately, it was a case of third time lucky, as plan C was a striking success. This stuck to using my body as the board, but combined pairs of needles acting as anchor points with cords to stretch everything into place.

This top shot and this side shot show the arrangement pretty clearly. It led to a fascinating headspace, as every small movement pulled at different needles and communicated sensation across my body. Piercing always makes me floaty and the bondage elements of this approach pushed me deeper into that subspace. It also created an interesting feedback loop. Arousal pulled at the needles and, masochist that I am, that made me more aroused, which pulled the needles even more painfully. Lydia always likes to layer sensation, so the nipples also got involved, with cord running from them down via a belly piercing to the top of the cock. You can see the nipple piercing here and a torso view here. That connection across the body brought my breathing into the picture, each breath pulling at the taut cord and signalling down to the needles in their sensitive homes. Very intense but equally stimulating.

I’m always happy and laughing at the end of a scene, but in this case I was particularly amused when it came time to take everything out and I could examine the arrangement more closely. It put me in mind of the famous scene in Gulliver’s travels when he visits Lilliput and gets tied down on the beach. Except instead of Gulliver and ropes there’s my cock and a lot of frayed cords. It’s not really how Swift first imagined it, but possibly my genitals might pull off the role better than Jack Black did.

Given all the naked me in the image links, it feels only fair to finish with someone who’s not only far more photogenic but also responsible for conceiving and executing the scene. This is the wonderful Lydia, taken from her new and excitingly revamped website.

Lady Lydia

A lack of forethought

Today I learned that drinking a lot of rum cocktails is not a wise way to prepare for a scene the next day, no matter how delicious said drinks are. Being hungover and feeling extra delicate really adds an edge to nipple piercing and ball spanking. On the plus side, the rush of endorphins those activities provoke do help ease the symptoms of over indulgence. I can’t sell them as a hangover cure, but they certainly helped take my mind off my aching head.

Fortunately I was playing with Mistress Ai-Li who, expert that she is, worked well around my planning failure. She managed to push me, without provoking any unpleasant reactions, which I’m sure was a result we both desired.

Domina Ai-Li

The image is from Mistress Ai-Li’s website. She’s based in the Bay area should you wish to experience her session skills for yourself.

Understated uniform

Apologies for the lack of posts this weekend. Once again I had plans for stuff to write and, once again, life got in the way. I hate it when that happens.

To start the new week, here’s a nicely composed example of a well worked theme – a dominant lady in a military uniform. This is Lady Stella of Studio Avalon. There are a million shots in this genre floating around, but I like this particular example because it’s quite understated. It’s not a crazy over the top uniform. The camera isn’t shooting from the worms eye viewpoint. And she’s standing on what appears to be a military parade ground. It looks like a great starting point for a serious and intense roleplay.

Lady Stella

Anything is contextual

One great way to infuriate a dominant is to claim you’ll do anything. It’s like a red rag to a bull. The typical response is either to reach for an extreme form of play (‘go fetch me my branding iron’) or to propose a very un-fun type of play (‘go clean my car while I watch TV in sweatpants’). The idea being to demonstrate that the submissive better be careful what options he or she open up. Mistress Matisse wrote a column some years ago that covered the topic from the dominant point of view pretty well.

I definitely understand that viewpoint when playing with someone new. In that case communication to set expectations is vital. In past posts I’ve termed the failure to do so Meat Loaf syndrome – ‘I’ll do anything for you….but not that‘. However, I do think it’s a viewpoint that sometimes gets pushed too far. BDSM negotiation isn’t divorced from the normal conventions of discussion. Being a dominant doesn’t give you a right to abandon common sense, and ‘anything’ is always contextual.

If a partner asks me where I want to eat tonight and I reply “Oh anywhere really, you pick,’ nobody would interpret that as carte blanche to do whatever they like. Dumpster diving behind Pizza Hut is out. As is booking tickets for a 6 hour flight to the New York restaurant scene. And if they know I’m horribly allergic to crab, my answer doesn’t mean I’m willing to swell up and die in the local crab shack. I don’t have to specify these things because any friend or partner with half a brain will understand my ‘anywhere’ response as being implicitly qualified.

The same thing goes to BDSM negotiation. Assuming we’re somewhat familiar with each other, then ‘anything’ means activities the same as or vaguely within touching distance of stuff we’ve tried or discussed before. And if there’s something new that a dominant would like to try, then the ‘anything’ response is a great cue to suggest it to me as an option. As a submissive I like to give my dominant choice and flexibility in a scene whenever possible. It seems odd to punish people for trying to do that by deliberately picking the worst possible interpretations of their responses.

Mistress Matisse

Having referenced an article from Mistress Matisse, that gives me the perfect excuse to feature an image of this rather fabulous lady. This is an old shot recently republished on her twitter feed, and captioned by her as “Behold me as a little baby dominatrix! Look how scowly and stern I was! Rar, fear me! (That didn’t last very long.)” Her professional site is viewable here.

Injury Timeout

Apologies for the lack of posts and comment responses in the last couple of days. Unfortunately I’ve been incapacitated with a screwy back. After years of being beaten, whipped, pierced and generally abused, it was a golf club that did for me. Or more accurately, my swinging of a golf club in a non-optimal fashion. One overly eager hip rotation landed me horizontal on the couch for two days with an icepack and a Firefly series DVD boxset. So safety tip of the week is stick to the whips and chains and steer clear of the Pings and plus fours.

I’m still having trouble sitting or standing for any length of time, so the next few posts will probably be short and sweet, relying on my image grab bag of fun shots. Here’s a perfect example of the type. Don’t know who it is, or where it’s from, but it’s hard not to like it. Two thumbs up indeed.

Two Thumbs Up

As I said, I don’t have an attribution for this, so feel free to leave a comment if you can help with that. I found it on the Pegging With a Smile tumblr.

A Stoya interlude

This isn’t really a post about femdom. Apologies in advance for that. But I found a fun, sexy and interesting short video that I liked and wanted to share. Fortunately I have a blog that allows me to do exactly that.

The video in question is Stoya sitting at a table and reading aloud from a book by Supervert. What makes it fun is the lady under the table with a Hitachi vibrator. Needless to say this makes it rather tricky for Stoya to maintain focus. You can read her impressions of the event here.

I have to admit to having a bit of a crush on Stoya. She has a rare presence to go along with her striking looks. Not to mention that she writes an excellent and thought provoking blog. Sadly I’m not aware of her doing any femdom material. However, this post does give me an excuse to feature this cute image of her dressed as the character ‘Death’ from the Sandman series. A happy Stoya in black boots as a Neil Gaiman character. What’s not to like?

Stoya As Death by photographer Lauren Goldberg

The image was created by the photographer Lauren Goldberg. You can see more from the same sequence here.

Superwoman (the real thing)

I’ve blogged about ridiculous female fantasy outfits in the past. After watching Excalibur last night – one of my favorite movies in the noble knight tradition (with its famous armor sex scene) – I felt like revisiting the topic.

This time I’m featuring some real life armor, as worn by Virginia Hankins. She’s has a fairly amazing resume, which includes being a professional stuntwoman, expert horse rider, archery coach, actress, mounted weapons trainer and the first female jouster for the Southern California Renaissance Pleasure Faire. With all those skills, I’d predict that she could give any would-be-Lancelot’s a good ass kicking with whatever weapon they wanted to pick.

Virgina Hankins in Armor

If this particular look appeals, then I’d also point you at this post, which features some more striking ladies in sensible armor. Not a cut away thigh guard or busty chest plate in sight.

A smart person saying smart things

This is a companion post (of sorts) to my one from a week ago entitled ‘Smart People Saying Stupid Things‘. That one concerned smart but non-kinky people being stupid about kink. This one features a smart but non-kinky person being insightful and observant. Like that last post, the linked text is lengthy and non-erotic, so if you’re simply looking for visual stimulation I’d suggest skipping to the picture at the bottom.

The smart person in question is Camille Paglia and the article that caught my eye is called ‘Scholars in Bondage‘. It’s a critique of three recent academic books on kink and BDSM by Margot Weiss, Staci Newmahr and Danielle J. Lindemann. All three generated a fair amount of online discussion, particularly the one by Margot Weiss. I think it’d be fair to say that Paglia is less than impressed with them, and her criticisms really resonated for me.

Primarily she attacks their tendency to bury their subjects under ‘a sludge of opaque theorizing’. They start with a fascinating subject, but rather than use the evidence they’ve gathered to illuminate it, they obfuscate it. They write defensively, for the benefit of their academic peers and the theoretical frameworks they’ve been taught, rather than to push our understanding of the subject forward. This is a common tendency in these kind of studies and it always annoys the hell out of me.

Her other major criticism is that they lack historical background. They’re so caught up in the theories of modern gender studies that the cultural context is entirely omitted. From early religious iconography, through Sade and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, up to Helmut Newton and Robert Mapplethorpe, there’s a rich and important cultural background to understand.

Finally, I particularly liked her closing thoughts on what S&M actually is.

My conclusion … was that sadomasochism is an archaic ritual form that descends from prehistoric nature cults and that erupts in sophisticated “late” phases of culture

Sadomasochism’s punitive hierarchical structure is ultimately a religious longing for order, marked by ceremonies of penance and absolution. Its rhythmic abuse of the body … is paradoxically a reinvigoration, a trancelike magical realignment with natural energies

I’m a non-religious person. I don’t ‘get’ religion and it makes no sense to me. But this remark did resonate. On the surface BDSM play seems sexual and hedonistic, a world away from the purity of religious penance and absolution. Yet, I wonder if the underlying psychology is actually quite similar. A great BDSM scene both focuses and energizes the self, but also liberates from a sense of self. The submissive/sinner is both the center of attention but also the least important person. They are reinvigorated through surrender and acquiescence.

La Papesse by Alessio Delfino

This image is by the Italian photographer Alessio Delfino. It’s from a series entitled Tarots and is called La Papesse. I originally found it on the Femdom Style Counsel tumblr.

Amusingly, when doing a reverse image search to track down the source for the image, I came across this modified version of it. I’m all for people exploring their kinks and creating their own porn, but this is a real WTF. I’m not sure what’s the idea behind combining that image with the additional surreal text (apparently she’s a financial adviser who likes baked oatmeal) and profane text (she likes peeing, shitting and spitting on slaves), but I think it sprained my brain.

Hot. Hot. Hot.

The West coast of America is a touch on the warm side at present. Temperatures in Seattle aren’t as scorching as in the South West, but it’s still plenty hot. It doesn’t help that AC is more of a nice to have than a must have around these parts.

Hot weather like this makes me desire two things. The first is to sit on a shaded patio, drink long tall drinks (a well made Singapore Sling is always a good option), and trade lazy conversation with my friends. The second is slow sticky sweaty sex of the non-kinky variety. That first desire is probably pretty common, but I’m not sure about the second. Most people want to avoid physical exertion in the heat. And it’s unusual for me to crave vanilla sex at all. I like it well enough, it’s just kink always seems to be more of a focus.

I suspect that the root of my desire is down to scent. Somehow in my mind the kind of light sweat and musk that people give us in the heat is associated with sex. That probably comes from growing up in cold damp England and never going to the gym. All my good memories about being sticky and sweaty involve intertwined naked bodies. As sensory associations go, it’s not a bad one to have.

Sweaty

This image of a beautiful sweaty body is by the photographer Andrew Lucas. I found it originally on the Systemat tumblr.